NEXTDC reported that it has signed on $28 million in sales to date, including managed service provider HarbourMSP, an unnamed global telco and an unnamed global content delivery network.

Beyond that, there is over $65 million of sales in the pipeline and the company has hired five additional sales staff to approach new opportunities.

Khuda said the company was “definitely not going to generate positive cash flow this year, probably not next year either.”

Large global data centre providers such as Digital Realty Trust and Equinix took three to five years to reach the utilisation rates (30 to 40 percent) required to generate positive cash flow.

But Khuda was confident shareholders understood that the short-term pain would be rewarded.

He noted that ten major customers signed on for the Brisbane facility within the first three weeks of it going live.

“It validates the demand is there, you just have to build it,” he said.

Khuda said there is a lot of noise about data centre builds in the industry, but few have the backing to proceed with builds before anchor tenants are signed.

He said NEXTDC “copped a fair bit of criticism” for going to the sharemarket rather than using debt to finance the build, but the strategy is paying off.

“We learned when we went through the GFC, you never run a project without equity, and you don’t rely on the bank. We talk to a lot of banks about data centres, but they don’t understand it, they only see it as a property play and ask real estate questions.”

Raising finance on the ASX helped “take the oxygen out of the market,” he said, as institutional shareholders have already backed one large national data centre provider in NEXTDC.

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